It's definitely a Love/Hate thing as Fran gets ready to make move

Nidge has his eyes set on being a Spanish crimelord as Love/Hate comes back to our screens with a bang this Sunday.

But his efforts to leave his demons behind him in Ireland and start afresh are in vain as he finds himself a stranger looking over his shoulder in a new narcotics landscape.

Speaking about what series five will bring for himself, Fran, Tommy, Elmo and the rest of the cast, Nidge - aka Tom Vaughan-Lawlor - has been revealing some of the direction the hit crime show will take, but without giving too much away.

"This year there's a reawakening and rebirth in Nidge and he's kick-started into the Spain thing with the renewed appetite for dining at the top table of European drug dealing," said Vaughan-Lawlor.

"His ambition is back, but there are ghosts that are still haunting him and he can't deal with them - he doesn't have the tools to understand his inner feelings.

"That's why this character is so rich to play, there's such depth to him."

While many critics and fans were vocal about the ending of season four, saying it was a let-down compared with previous season finales, Vaughan-Lawlor said writer Stuart Carolan was introducing a subtlety to the show's direction that needed to be explored.

"We'd gone so high, so fast and it was such a force of nature that I think it's human nature for people to start to examine things more closely and poke holes in it," he said.

"There's so much heat and hype coming off the show that sometimes the subtlety of it is missed."

Season five sees Nidge and crew take off for Spain, mirroring the way many of Ireland's drug lords were either lured to the Spanish sun by the promise of higher profits or forced to flee there to escape the heat from gardai and enemies here.

While Nidge and his sidekick Fran have worked together in Dublin despite occasional simmering tensions and differences of opinion, things come to a head in Spain where a new and brutal rift develops.

"In one way they're very different, and in another way they're cut from the same cloth. There's tension there and there's an underlying niggle in terms of who has the higher status," Vaughan-Lawlor said in an interview with the latest RTE Guide.

And while he remained tight-lipped about details, Vaughan-Lawlor revealed that the relationship between Nidge and Fran in many ways becomes central to the next series.

"In a fight situation Fran would flatten Nidge, but Nidge is more shrewd. They're a very interesting match in terms of their jousting," he said, adding that filming in Spain "had been incredibly exciting".